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Pros: iPod matching transparent and white plastic earphones with great sound balance and crisp detail for the lower mid-range price.
Cons: None.
Last week, we selected Sony's MDR-EX81 white in-canal earphones (iLounge rating: A) as our top low-end ($60 or less) pick to replace Apple's packed-in iPod ear buds. Today, we've selected Etymotic Research's ER-6i Isolators as our current top pick in the $150 or less category, following in the footsteps of the company's ER-4 series headphones ($330), winner of our iPod Audio Accessory of the Year award.
If part of the appeal of any product is its beauty, the ER-6i earphones are an iPod lover's dream. With white and clear housings for their drivers, white cords and white rubber triple flanges that fit into your ears, they're as interesting to look at as they are to wear and hear. Five feet of cord guarantee that you can show off your iPod from a distance, and a simple thin white and gold-tipped headphone plug guarantees compatibility with any iPod case you might purchase. A white plastic clip right below the Y-joint of the headphones lets you attach the ER-6is easily to clothing, too.
The single-driver earpieces combine the triple flanges of Etymotic's expensive ER-4 series with far more attractive, partially see-through housings marked L and R. We find the silicone rubber flanges to be more comfortable than average – not the equal of Sony's MDR-EX70 series or EX81s, but better than most other alternatives we've tried, including expensive custom-fit earphones for that matter. As advertised, the three ribs of rubber plug your ear canals, isolating music inside while blocking off outside noise. Etymotic's triple flanges do a better job than most if not all of the active noise cancellation systems we've tried, and don't require gigantic ear cups to achieve the effect.
(Two foam rubber earpieces are also included for those who prefer to get a more personalized fit; we liked the flanges better.) And best yet, the ER-6is are very lightweight, including their thin and unobtrusive cords.
Etymotic also includes a filter changing tool, replacement wax filters, and a carrying pouch with each set of ER-6is. The carrying pouch is Etymotic's best yet, and a leading contender for coolest pack-in we've seen. Made from strong ribbed plastic on the outside, lined with soft fabric on the inside, and sealed with circles of Velcro, the pouch looks great, holds the earphones well, and manages to do both without typical pouch zippers or ballistic nylon. Though marginally less secure because it doesn't zip closed, we prefer it to the cases included with the ER-4 headphones, Sony's MDR-EX81s, and numerous other cases we've tried.
Sound quality is exactly what it should be at this point in time for Etymotic's $149.00 asking price: noticeably clearer than and decidedly preferable to the Sony EX81s we liked at a lower price point, but not quite as clean and mind-altering as the more expensive ER-4 series. The ER-6is are enough of a step above "standard�? earphones to justify their higher price tag, providing wonderfully balanced treble and bass response, plus a level of clarity that lower-end earphones rarely deliver. Critically, you do not have to turn the volume up to hear details in your music that you've never heard before; the ER-6is just deliver them to you, regardless of volume level.
In keeping with the preferences of typical users, Etymotic added a little extra bass to the ER-6is, deviating from their standard practice of neutrally representing sound, and at this price point we think the decision was wise. There's enough bass to give a little thump, but not an overpowering, flat or distorted booming. Treble is similarly pleasant, not exaggerated: the ER-6is never sound tinny or shrill.
For such tiny drivers, they create a believable sound stage with more than adequate richness and depth, but crisp, well-defined treble is their hallmark. Instruments generally stand apart from each other rather than blurring together.
To put these comments in the broader perspective of our recent headphone reviews, we've tested $900 headphones from Ultimate Ears and found them to be remarkably similar to (though modestly better than) Etymotic's considerably cheaper ER-4Ps. The similarity factor there was 95%, give or take a few percent. Comparing the ER-4Ps to the ER-6is is closer to 80% – a more noticeable step down. But from our perspective, the ER-6is represent a 30-40% step up from Sony's EX81s, a major improvement in sound quality at an acceptable premium.
And for some people, the sound difference between the ER-4P and the ER-6i earphones will not be enough to justify their $179 price difference. We could understand this way of thinking entirely, and simply say that it makes complete sense that Etymotic would offer something cheaper and iPod specific that's more reasonably priced than the professional grade ER-4 series, with only a modest performance hit. But we do think that the sound difference between the ER-6is and the EX81s is enough to justify the purchase of Etymotics' earphones if you're willing to spend the extra money, particularly given that some retailers are selling the ER-6is at the $120.00 mark. Like the ER-4 series, the ER-6is will reveal layers of your favorite songs that you've never heard before – just not as clearly as the ER-4s – and we feel quite confident that you will seriously enjoy your music more having used them.
While we recognize that it's virtually impossible to satisfy everybody, we only like to recommend products at our flat A level when we feel confident that any person who spends the money to buy them won't walk away feeling disappointed.


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Sunday, September 19, 2010
4.0 Paladin Healing (at 80)
1. I don't think the mana requirements are in at 80.
Now maybe the mana requirements drastically increase from 81-85, but at level 80 they're negligible. The only way to run dry would be to spam Divine Light (the big heal) or Flash of Light (now an expensive, fast heal).
2. Holy Shock and Word of Glory are the go-to heals.
They're fast, cheap and heal for a decent amount. I was using Holy Shock on cooldown, tossing WoG when I hit 3 Holy Power, and filling in with Holy Light on non-tanks and Divine Light on the tanks.
3. Beacon of Light is now dirt-cheap.
It's so cheap that Beacon is a no-brainer now. Just put Beacon on the tank and heal as if Beacon did not exist. It only transfers 50%. If you heal a non-tank, the tank gets a little heal as a side-effect. If you heal the tank, you get a boost of Holy Power.
4. Flash of Light is obsolete.
Holy Shock is instant, costs 25% of the mana, and heals for something like 66% of FoL. WoG heals for 66% and is free. Plus, after a HS, HL or DL are sped up, so they can land very quickly. And you can proc Daybreak to get double HS and then chain into Word of Glory for very quick heals. I'm not really sure I see what situation FoL would fit in now.
5. One-click buffing is awesome.
One button press, and everyone gets Kings. Heaven.
6. Light of Dawn is ... interesting.
I don't really know about this spell. The thing is that in the two heroics I ran, the only time everyone took damage was when the DPS pulled aggro. More often than not, they were running around like monkeys so it was really hard to get all of the them in the cone.
As well, it's a good heal, but it won't keep a group up when mobs are beating on them. It seems fine for splash damage, but not when people pull aggro. Plus it's on a fairly long cooldown, long enough that it often falls out of mind.
7. The Healing Mastery is okay.
The healing mastery puts a temporary shield on your heal target for 8 seconds. The shield is for about 8% of heals. It's okay, but the only problem is that the shield doesn't increase with subsequent heals unless it expires. This is especially problematic as Holy Shock tends to hit quickly after the last heal, before the shield can expire. So you often end up losing some of your mastery if you heal the same target twice in a row.
This could be a bug, so we'll see if Blizzard fixes it.
So is the new healing model better?
Well, it's certainly better than spamming Holy Light all the time. But I'm not sure about the actual triage involved. The thing is that you want to use HS all the time, because it's cheap, fast, heals for a decent amount, and is the primary generator of Holy Power, which gives you your Word of Glories. So really, I found I was following a strict priority of WoG-3, HS, then Holy Light. The only exception was if the tank dropped to 50-60%, at which point I used Divine Light to bring them back.
The problem I see with making mana more important is that if Holy Shock gets more expensive, then a paladin will be less likely to use it. But that will mean less Word of Glories, so you're kind of just left with Holy Light.
It could work, but it does feel as if HS and WoG are too tightly bound to really allow one to truly triage and conserve mana. But I don't know. I'd really have to try first-hand the later levels when mana restrictions actually kick in.
16 comments:
Solid write-up. My experience on the PTR with Holy is similar to yours.
I also found myself pre-healing the tank to stack Holy Light x3 before he pulled. That's interesting, but it will get old fast.
Regarding Flash of Light; there are multiple aspects of Cataclysm encounters that could forge a niche for Flash of Light.
For starters, the latest beta patch nerfed Holy Light's base healing by 25% and increased the mana cost. Essentially, they just significantly nerfed it's efficiency (heal-per-mana HPM) as well as it's throughput.
Next, consider mechanics such as Mimiron's Plasma Blast (many ticks of large damage for a short period). This is the kind of situation where your WoGx3->HS may need to be backed up by FoL spam.
Other kinds of mechanics that may necessitate a fast heal are LK's Infestation (WoGx3 + HS the first guy, but then it's FoL spam + Holy Radiance (AoE heal @ 83).
So while I certainly agree that the PTR build has renderred FoL almost completely useless, I am encouraged by the signs from the Cataclysm beta.
Thanks for the write-up though, a very enjoyable read!- Anonymous4:00 AM, September 20, 2010
I've actually been using LoD as a tank; Paladin tanking is pretty 'empty' in the rotation at the moment, and during times when there's a bunch of meaningful raid damage -- think Precious's decimate, Festergut's Pungent Blight, in Wrath terms -- it provides a significant help.
(One encounter I used it on was Grand Vizier Ertan, who currently has an unavoidable raidwide damage that does about 40k; poppin LoD isn't going to fill people up, but it will help a bit when shit gets rough.) - Anonymous5:43 AM, September 20, 2010
What about Sacred Shield? Is there an incentive to put it on the tank?
When I tank a PuG on my paladin, more often than not the paladin healers are not keeping Sacred Shield up and I have to keep it myself. From what I heard SS scales with spellpower, which healers are sure to have more than I. @openid, Light of Dawn is the new 31-point healing talent. Not sure how you access it as a tank. Do you mean the new AoE heal you get at level 81?
@anon, Sacred Shield doesn't exist anymore. You get shields from the Holy paladin Mastery. When you cast a heal on someone, they get a shield worth 8% of that heal (including any overheal).Hey, nice post just note that in my pally on lv 80 gear after reforging mostly haste and crit into Mastery my heals shield for 18% of the amount healed, and it is a 5 sec duration not 8 sec and yes they do refresh but only if the heal is bigged for example if you do a 5k holy light it will shield for about 900 for me but if the next holy light i cast hits for 8k withing those 5 seconds the shield is up it will replace the old shield with the new shield just like the Scarab's brooch from AQ40 currently works now I also have Beta and I have an 85 paladin and my shields are up to 25% sheild from mastery rating that plus valanyr plus the trinket i just mentioned above can make quite a bubble thie only problem with the trinket is you will love alot of stats so it is not recomended IMO, as far as mana goes well I did not reforge any spirit on ptr and on my 80 paladin I have 1300 spirit I also did icc in PTR and as you may know the ICC instance buff is gone nevertheless we 2 healed it me and a disc priest and let me tell you it was awesome I was doing like 7 k hps on most fights in 10m normal also about WoG maybe i am just lucky but you know the protection talent that has a 30% chance to make it consume no holy power well turns out it procced 6 times in a row for me once and 2 times + many many other times I think it is surely amazing.
ReplyDelete- Anonymous9:37 AM, September 24, 2010
Maybe this is obvious, but does this mean the Frost libram will actually get some use, now? Or do you get better librams from quests at 80?
ReplyDelete - Anonymous9:09 AM, September 27, 2010
Yes, at level 80, it's not so bad. However, by the time we get to 85, our mana pool less than doubles (mine is 68,000), however the mana cost of our spells almost triples. To make matters worse, in iLvl 333 gear, my heals barely saw an increase over when I cast them at 80. For example, the tank has about 100k health. The maximum I can heal him for is about 25k with Divine Light, and that's about one seventh of my mana pool. The mobs in heroics also hit hard, so I'm having to spam FoL at times just to keep him up, especially if we have no CC. So yes, FoL is very useful when damage gets spiky.
ReplyDelete I made a premade character on the beta and was working healing on my paladin, i was having mana issues still becuase of the lack of CC and the amount of damage that was being passed around from the cleaves and what not. I tried this for 2 different duegons and had the same issues. Im going to look over and try what you posted and see if that helps. my mana is like 60-70k atm and i ran out really really fast if i have to spam Divinie light. Flash of light uses like 8k mana and heals for about 8-10k while Holy light only heals for 5-8k this is what bugs me.
ReplyDeleteOk i play a 80 holy pally and that is it i find that in heroics there is no mana problems however when you get to a raid it is a diffrent story due to the much higher damage taken your HS and WOG cant quite keep up therefor you have to use larger heals and mana becomes an issue. In regards to your were dose FOL fit in. Dream Walker being as it is a large fast heal it is ideal and given the mana regen buff it can be spammed no problem along with DL. I recommend in a raid keeping HS and WOG on cool down as well as HL as a filler and you should be fine. Finally the cool new heal keep it on cool down just take a few sec turn toward the raid it really can make a big difference this is assuming that you have enough critical strike making it hit for 10 - 11 k. it could be the difference between a wipe and success. i would like comments on this style of healing there is always room to learn.

subset: commoncrawl


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Rory Jones, Class of 2012
Open gallery
Rory Jones—a history and German major—was active academically, especially in his Paideia cohort, as well as outside the classroom. His intentional integration of academics with extracurricular activities left him with a desire to tell incoming students to "take time to find yourself—it's worth it."
While Rory's main focus at Southwestern was academics, he was also able to try different things, "many of which I would never have gotten to do at a bigger school," he says. "I played an NCAA sport (tennis); anywhere else, I would not have been able to say that … Southwestern is just a completely different experience." He advises new students to get involved early on, saying, "You'll have more regrets about the things you didn't do than the things you did."
He was also involved in campus organizations like Fellowship of Christian Athletes, Phi Beta Kappa academic honor society and Student Foundation, where he led a team of five in promoting and fundraising for the Pirate Bike Program. Meanwhile, he cultivated his passion for history as an intern with both the Williamson Museum Collections and the Dallas Holocaust Museum.
But the highlight of Rory's Southwestern Experience, he says, was his trip to the Gila Wilderness in New Mexico with the Destination: Service (alternative Spring Break) Program. He says, "Going in, I knew maybe five of the group of 20 … I feel like we all became a family through the work we did, cooking all our own meals, camping out under the stars in 30-degree weather—it was awesome!"
Rory is currently living in Lutherstadt Wittenberg, Germany, and is an English teaching assistant at the Ganztagsschule Friedrichstadt. As a Fulbright Scholar, he is also continuing research he began when working on his German honors thesis.
Following his Fulbright commitment, Rory is considering becoming a high school teacher, but is "keeping his options open." Whatever he chooses to do, he feels highly prepared by Southwestern. "I know how to read critically and write analytically, which, if you break it down, is the essence of many jobs today," he says.
He also hopes to compete on an Ultimate Frisbee team when he returns to the U.S. "I bleed Ultimate!"
Sprechen sie Texan?
Prestigious Fulbright Teaching Assistantship awards provide recipients with an initiation into the idea of cultural ambassadorship.They emphasize understanding cultures in depth and inspire the same kind of curiosity about and respect for others that we are working toward at Southwestern.


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Homeless man charged in subway train death, denied bail
Authorities charged a homeless man in the death of a Korean-born man pushed in front of an oncoming subway train and killed as onlookers watched.
Naeem Davis, 30, was arraigned Wednesday night on a second-degree murder charge and ordered held without bail in the death of 58-year-old Ki-Suck Han on Monday. He is due back in court on Dec. 11.
As the handcuffed defendant walked past reporters he blamed the victim for what happened.
"He attacked me first. He grabbed me," Davis said.
Asked by a television news reporter if he meant to kill Han, Davis replied "No."
Prosecutor James Lin told the judge that Davis saw the train strike Han before leaving the Times Square station.
"The defendant never once offered any aid to the victim as the train approached the platform and in fact, this defendant watched the train hit the victim," Lin said.
But Davis' Legal Aid lawyer, Stephen Pokart, said outside court that his client reportedly "was involved in an incident with a man who was drunk and angry."
A witness, Leigh Weingus, told The New York Times that Han appeared to be aggressive toward Davis.
"The victim kept saying "Hey! Hey!' at the suspect, getting closer and closer to him," she said. "At first Davis appeared calm, saying 'I don't know you, you don't know me, get out of my face."
Han's wife had said she had argued with her husband that morning and that he had been drinking.
Davis has several prior arrests in New York and Pennsylvania on mostly minor charges including drug possession.
Relatives and friends on Thursday bid a final farewell to Han at a funeral chapel festooned in floral arrangements in Flushing, Queens.
His widow and daughter knelt before the open coffin for several minutes before taking their seats in the front row for the Korean-spoken service.
Han's death got widespread attention not only for its horrific nature, but because he was photographed a split-second before the train trapped him and seemingly no one attempted to come to his aid.
Han's only child, 20-year-old Ashley, said at a news conference Wednesday that her father was always willing to help someone. But when asked about why no one helped him up, she said: "What's done is done."
"The thought of someone helping him up in a matter of seconds would have been great," she said.
A freelance photographer for the New York Post was waiting for a train Monday afternoon when he said he saw a man approach Han at the Times Square station, get into an altercation with him and push him into the train's path.
The Post photo in Tuesday's edition showed Ki-Suck Han with his head turned toward the train, his arms reaching up but unable to climb off the tracks in time.
The photographer, R. Umar Abbasi, told NBC's "Today" show Wednesday that he was trying to alert the motorman to what was going on by flashing his camera.
He said he was shocked that people nearer to the victim didn't try to help in the 22 seconds before the train struck.
"It took me a second to figure out what was happening ... I saw the lights in the distance. My mind was to alert the train," Abbasi said.
"The people who were standing close to him ... they could have moved and grabbed him and pulled him up. No one made an effort," he added.
In a written account Abbasi gave the Post, he said a crowd took videos and snapped photos on their cellphones after Han was pulled, limp, onto the platform. He said he shoved them back as a doctor and another man tried to resuscitate the victim, but Han died in front of them.
Ashley Han and her mother, Serim Han, met reporters Wednesday inside their Presbyterian church in Queens. The family came to the U.S. from Korea about 25 years ago. They said Han was unemployed and had been looking for work. Their pastor said the family was so upset by the front-page photo of Han in the Post that they had to stay with him for comfort.
"I just wish I had one last chance to tell my dad how much I love him," Ashley Han said.
Subway pushes are feared but fairly unusual. Among the more high-profile cases was the January 1999 death of Kendra Webdale, who was shoved to her death by a former mental patient.
Subway riders said they were shocked by Han's death but that it's always a silent fear for many of the more than 5.2 million commuters who ride the subway on an average weekday.
"Stuff like that you don't really think about every day. You know it could happen. So when it does happen it's scary but then what it all comes down to is you have to protect yourself," said Aliyah Syphrett, 23, who sat on a bench as she waited at Pennsylvania Station in Manhattan.


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The Federal Emergency Management Agency is sending $7.4 million to Louisiana in Hurricane Isaac recovery funds to help impacted families with additional household and education needs and more.
The FEMA dollars are going to the Louisiana Department of Children and Family Services for a Disaster Case Management Program to aid Isaac victims.
Sen. Mary Landrieu announced the new grant Tuesday and said that she had pressed for such family assistance with FEMA administrator Craig Fugate.
The state says case managers are expected to assess individual and family needs and connect people with the appropriate services both in the short and long term.


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My last post was all about how I have started my #healthyjanuary journey, I am encouraging my family and my self to eat healthy. You can read all about it in my post here. I also explained in the post how to make smoothie packs for the freezer so that its easy to make your #onthegosmoothie in the morning. I created this delicious smoothie using my mango, avocado, spinach and dates pack that I premade and have frozen into single servings.
- 1 Medium Mango diced
- 1/2 Ripe Avocado
- 4 Ripe dates
- Small handful Spinach
- 240 ml Water
- 1/2 teaspoon Chia seeds


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From the Hans Christian Andersen biography "The Life of Hans Christian Andersen. Day By Day", written by DPhil Johan de Mylius:
2 July
Revises his testament. Notes down various minor sums which are to be distributed immediately after his death.
5 July
Has not been able to sleep, due to a poem which he has in his mind ("Fyn og Schweiz" (Funen and Switzerland); it is also a poem about the extremes in his life and about death). Dictates it to Mrs Melchior. The poem is published post-humously in December in Karl Schmidt's Julebog 1875 (Christmas Book 1875) (Odense).
During this period of severe illness, HCA lies dictating sporadic memories of "loose" women and of women who had made themselves available to him. Amongst the comments he dictates to the diary are sentences such as;
"Often so little strength while dying that through our smallest nerve it is entirely ebbing out. It leads to a clarity, which also gives light" (23rd July).
"Every 6th breaking wave from the sea is to be smaller, yet a breaker all the same, and so it is with thought"
(24th July).
HCA is not at all coherent in the last few weeks of his life, and often not conscious.
4 August
HCA dies at five minutes past eleven. The cause of death is registered as cancer of the liver.
The magazine-illustrator Knud Gamborg draws HCA on his deathbed. This drawing is used to produce a highly embellished and idealised woodcut, which is printed in Illustreret Tidende. The drawing shows the deceased HCA alone, while the woodcut shows the dying HCA surrounded by the Melchior family.
11 August
The funeral service for HCA is held at Copenhagen's cathedral "Vor Frue Kirke", (The Church of Our Lady). The king and crown prince are present. Speeches are made by Archdeacon C. Rothe and Bishop C.T. Engelstoft from Odense. HCA's own song, "Som Bladet, der fra Træet falder" (Like The Leaf, Falling From The Tree) is sung, and at the end; "Sov du trætte Barn, sov sødt,/aldrig ængstet mer og saaret" (Sleep, weary child, sleep tight/never again frightened and wounded), written by Carl Ploug for the occasion.
HCA was buried at the cemetery "Assistens Kirkegård" in a plot which Edvard Collin had picked out for HCA, himself and his wife Henriette. HCA was therefore buried in the western portion of the plot and the monument was erected there. Edvard dies in 1886 and Henriette 1894, but their headstone is later (1914) moved to the Collins' family burial plot at Frederiksberg cemetery, as a controversy had developed in the newspapers about the Collins' treatment of HCA. Edvard and Henriette did however remain where they were buried. But after their headstone had been moved, the plot at Assistens cemetery was changed so that HCA's monument was placed in the middle.
The stone is inscribed with the last 4 lines of HCA's poem "Oldingen" (The Old Man) from 1874:
The soul which God in his image created,
Is incorruptible, can not be lost.
Our life on earth is the seed of eternity,
Our body dies, but the soul can not die!


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235Chapter XVIII.—The Manner in which Apollonius refuted the Phrygians, and the Persons16171617 Or events (τίνων).whom he Mentions.
1. As the so-called Phrygian heresy16181618 On the name, see chap. 16, note 2. was still flourishing in Phrygia in his time, Apollonius16191619 Of this Apollonius we know little more than what Eusebius tells us in this chapter. The author of Prædestinatus (in the fifth century) calls him bishop of Ephesus, but his authority is of no weight. Jerome devotes chap. 40 of his de vir. ill. to Apollonius, but it is clear that he derives his knowledge almost exclusively from Eusebius. He adds the notice, however, that Tertullian replied to Apollonius' work in the seventh book of his own work, de Ecstasi (now lost). The character of Apollonius' work may be gathered from the fragments preserved by Eusebius in this chapter. It was of the same nature as the work of the anonymous writer quoted in chap. 16, very bitter in tone and not over-scrupulous in its statements. Apollonius states (see in §12, below) that he wrote the work forty years after the rise of Montanism. If we accepted the Eusebian date for its beginning (172), this would bring us down to 212, but (as remarked above, in chap. 16, note 12) Montanism had probably begun in a quiet way sometime before this, and so Apollonius' forty years are perhaps to be reckoned from a somewhat earlier date. His mention of "the prophetess" as still living (in §6, below) might lead us to think that Maximilia was still alive when he wrote; but when the anonymous wrote she was already dead, and the reasons for assigning the latter to a date as early as 192 are too strong to be set aside. We must therefore suppose Apollonius to be referring to some other prophetess well known in his time. That there were many such prophetesses in the early part of the third century is clear from the works of Tertullian. Jerome (ibid.) states that an account of the death of Montanus and his prophetesses by hanging was contained in Apollonius' work, but it has been justly suspected that he is confusing the work of the anonymous, quoted in chap. 16, above, with the work of Apollonius, quoted in this chapter. The fragments of Apollonius' work, preserved by Eusebius, are given, with a commentary, in Routh's Rel. Sac. I. p. 467 sq., and an English translation in the Ante-Nicene Fathers, VIII. p. 775 sq. also, an ecclesiastical writer, undertook its refutation, and wrote a special work against it, correcting in detail the false prophecies current among them and reproving the life of the founders of the heresy. But hear his own words respecting Montanus:
2. "His actions and his teaching show who this new teacher is. This is he who taught the dissolution of marriage;16201620 We are not to gather from this that the Montanists forbade marriage. They were, to be sure, decidedly ascetic in their tendencies, and they did teach the unlawfulness of second marriages,—which had long been looked upon with disfavor in many quarters, but whose lawfulness the Church had never denied,—and magnified the blessedness of the single state; but beyond this they did not go, so far as we are able to judge. Our chief sources for the Montanistic view of marriage are Tertullian's works ad Uxorem, de Pudicit., de Monogamia, de Exhort. ad castitat., and Epiphanius' Hær. XLVIII. 9. who made laws for fasting;16211621 One great point of dispute between the Montanists and the Catholics was the subject of fasts (cf. Hippolytus, VIII. 12, X. 21, who makes it almost the only ground of complaint against the Montanists). The Montanist prophetesses ordained two new fasts of a week each in addition to the annual paschal fast of the Church; and the regulations for these two weeks were made very severe. Still further they extended the duration of the regular weekly (Wednesday and Friday) fasts, making them cover the whole instead of only a part of the day. The Catholics very strenuously opposed these ordinances, not because they were opposed to fasting (many of them indulged extensively in the practice), but because they objected to the imposition of such extra fasts as binding upon the Church. They were satisfied with the traditional customs in this matter, and did not care to have heavier burdens imposed upon the Christians in general than their fathers had borne. Our principal sources for a knowledge of the dispute between the Montanists and Catholics on this subject are Tertullian's de Jejuniis; Epiphanius, Hær. XLVIII. 8; Jerome, Ep. ad Marcellam (Migne, Ep. XLI. 3), Comment. in Matt. c. 9, vers. 15; and Theodoret, Hær. Fab. III. 2. who named Pepuza and Tymion,16221622 Pepuza was an obscure town in the western part of Phrygia; Tymion, otherwise unknown, was probably situated in the same neighborhood. Pepuza was early made, and long continued, the chief center—the Jerusalem—of the sect, and even gave its name to the sect in many quarters. Harnack has rightly emphasized the significance of this statement of Apollonius, and has called attention to the fact that Montanus' original idea must have been the gathering of the chosen people from all the world into one region, that they might form one fold, and freed from all the political and social relations in which they had hitherto lived might await the coming of the Lord, who would speedily descend, and set up his kingdom in this new Jerusalem. Only after this idea had been proved impracticable did Montanism adapt itself to circumstances and proceed to establish itself in the midst of society as it existed in the outside world. That Montanus built upon the Gospel of John, and especially upon chaps. x. and xvii., in this original attempt of his, is perfectly plain (cf. Harnack's Dogmengeschichte, I. p. 319 and 323. With this passage from Apollonius, compare also Epiphanius, Hær. XLVIII. 14 and XLIX. 1., and Jerome Ep. ad Marcellam). small towns in Phrygia, Jerusalem, wishing to gather people to them from all directions; who appointed collectors of money;16231623 This appointment of economic officers and the formation of a compact organization were a part of the one general plan, referred to in the previous note, and must have marked the earliest years of the sect. Later, when it was endeavoring to adapt itself to the catholic Church, and to compromise matters in such a way as still to secure recognition from the Church, this organization must have been looked upon as a matter of less importance, and indeed probably never went far beyond the confines of Phrygia. That it continued long in that region, however, is clear from Jerome's words in his Epistle to Marcella already referred to. Compare also chap 16, note 25. who contrived the receiving of gifts under the name of offerings; who provided salaries for those who preached his doctrine, that its teaching might prevail through gluttony."16241624 There can be little doubt that the Church teachers and other officers were still supported by voluntary contributions, and hence Apollonius was really scandalized at what he considered making merchandise of spiritual things (cf. the Didache, chaps. XI. and XII.; but even in the Didache we find already a sort of stated salary provided for the prophets; cf. chap. XII.). For him to conclude, however, from the practice instituted by the Montanists in accordance with their other provisions for the formation of a compact organization, that they were avaricious and gluttonous, is quite unjustifiable, just as much so as if our salaried clergy to-day should be accused, as a class, of such sins.
3. He writes thus concerning Montanus; and a little farther on he writes as follows concerning his prophetesses: "We show that these first prophetesses themselves, as soon as they were filled with the Spirit, abandoned their husbands. How falsely therefore they speak who call Prisca a virgin."16251625 See chap. 16, note 18.
4. Afterwards he says: "Does not all Scripture seem to you to forbid a prophet to receive gifts and money?16261626 See note 8. When therefore I see the prophetess receiving gold and silver and costly garments, how can I avoid reproving her?"
5. And again a little farther on he speaks thus concerning one of their confessors:
"So also Themiso,16271627 On Themiso, see chap. 16, note 31. who was clothed with plausible covetousness, could not endure the sign of confession, but threw aside bonds for an abundance of possessions. Yet, though he should have been humble on this account, he dared to boast as a martyr, and in imitation of the apostle, he wrote a certain catholic16281628 καθολικὴν ἐπιστολήν. Catholic in the sense in which the word is used of the epistles of James, Peter, John, and Jude; that is, general, addressed to no particular church. The epistle is no longer extant. Its "blasphemy" against the Lord and his apostles lay undoubtedly in its statement of the fundamental doctrine of the Montanists, that the age of revelation had not ceased, but that through the promised Paraclete revelations were still given, which supplemented or superseded those granted the apostles by Christ. epistle, 236to instruct those whose faith was better than his own, contending for words of empty sound, and blaspheming against the Lord and the apostles and the holy Church."
6. And again concerning others of those honored among them as martyrs, he writes as follows:
"Not to speak of many, let the prophetess herself tell us of Alexander,16291629 This fragment gives us our only information in regard to this Alexander. That there may be some truth in the story told by Apollonius cannot be denied. It is possible that Alexander was a bad man, and that the Montanists had been deceived in him, as often happens in all religious bodies. Such a thing might much more easily happen after the sect had been for a number of years in a flourishing condition than in its earlier years; and the exactness of the account, and the challenge to disprove it, would seem to lend it some weight. At the same time Apollonius is clearly as unprincipled and dishonest a writer as the anonymous, and hence little reliance can be placed upon any of his reports to the discredit of the Montanists. If the anonymous made so many accusations out of whole cloth, Apollonius may have done the same in the present instance; and the fact that many still "worshiped" him would seem to show that Apollonius' accusations, if they possessed any foundation, were at any rate not proven. who called himself a martyr, with whom she is in the habit of banqueting, and who is worshiped16301630 A very common accusation brought against various sects. Upon the significance of it, see Harnack, Dogmengeschichte, I. p. 82, note 2. by many. We need not mention his robberies and other daring deeds for which he was punished, but the archives16311631 ὀπισθόδομος, originally the back chamber of the old temple of Athenæ on the Acropolis at Athens, where the public treasure was kept. It then came to be used of the inner chamber of any temple where the public treasure was kept, and in the present instance is used of the apartment which contained the public records or archives. Just below, Apollonius uses the phrase δημόσιον ἀρχεῖον, in referring to the same thing. contain them.
7. Which of these forgives the sins of the other? Does the prophet the robberies of the martyr, or the martyr the covetousness of the prophet? For although the Lord said, 'Provide neither gold, nor silver, neither two coats,'16321632 Matt. x. 9, 10. these men, in complete opposition, transgress in respect to the possession of the forbidden things. For we will show that those whom they call prophets and martyrs gather their gain not only from rich men, but also from the poor, and orphans, and widows.
8. But if they are confident, let them stand up and discuss these matters, that if convicted they may hereafter cease transgressing. For the fruits of the prophet must be tried; 'for the tree is known by its fruit.'16331633 Matt. xii. 33.
9. But that those who wish may know concerning Alexander, he was tried by Æmilius Frontinus,16341634 We know, unfortunately, nothing about this proconsul, and hence have no means of fixing the date of this occurrence. proconsul at Ephesus; not on account of the Name,16351635 i.e. of Christ. but for the robberies which he had committed, being already an apostate.16361636 παραβ€της Afterwards, having falsely declared for the name of the Lord, he was released, having deceived the faithful that were there.16371637 εἶτα ἐπιψευσ€μενος τῷ ὀνόματι τοῦ κυρίου ἀπολέλυται πλανήσας τοὺς ἐκεῖ πιστούς. The meaning seems to be that while in prison he pretended to be a Christian, and thus obtained the favor of the brethren, who procured his release by using their influence with the judge. And his own parish, from which he came, did not receive him, because he was a robber.16381638 We have no means of controlling the truth of this statement. Those who wish to learn about him have the public records16391639 δημόσιον ἀρχεῖον. of Asia. And yet the prophet with whom he spent many years knows nothing about him!16401640 ὃν ὁ προφήτης συνόντα πολλοῖς žτεσιν ἀγνοεῖ, as is read by all the mss., followed by the majority of the editors. Heinichen reads ᾧ ὁ προφήτης συνὼν πολλοις žτεσιν ἀγνοεῖ, but the emendation is quite unnecessary. The ἀγνοεῖ implies ignorance of the man's true character; although with him so many years, he knows nothing about him, is ignorant of his true character! The sentence is evidently ironical.
10. Exposing him, through him we expose also the pretense16411641 τὴν ὑπόστασιν of the prophet. We could show the same thing of many others. But if they are confident, let them endure the test."
11. Again, in another part of his work he speaks as follows of the prophets of whom they boast:
"If they deny that their prophets have received gifts, let them acknowledge this: that if they are convicted of receiving them, they are not prophets. And we will bring a multitude of proofs of this. But it is necessary that all the fruits of a prophet should be examined. Tell me, does a prophet dye his hair?16421642 β€πτεται Does a prophet stain his eyelids?16431643 στιβίζεται Does a prophet delight in adornment? Does a prophet play with tables and dice? Does a prophet lend on usury? Let them confess whether these things are lawful or not; but I will show that they have been done by them."16441644 Knowing what we do of the asceticism and the severe morality of the Montanists, we can look upon the implications of this passage as nothing better than baseless slanders. That there might have been an individual here and there whose conduct justified this attack cannot be denied, but to bring such accusations against the Montanists in general was both unwarranted and absurd, and Apollonius cannot but have been aware of the fact. His language is rather that of a bully or braggadocio who knows the untruthfulness of his statements, than of a man conscious of his own honesty and of the reliability of his account.
12. This same Apollonius states in the same work that, at the time of his writing, it was the fortieth year since Montanus had begun his pretended prophecy.16451645 On the date of Apollonius' work, see above, note 3.
13. And he says also that Zoticus, who was mentioned by the former writer,16461646 See chap. 16, §17. when Maximilla was pretending to prophesy in Pepuza, resisted her and endeavored to refute the spirit that was working in her; but was prevented by those who agreed with her. He mentions also a certain Thraseas16471647 This Thraseas is undoubtedly to be identified with Thraseas, "bishop and martyr of Eumenia," mentioned by Polycrates, as quoted in chap. 24, below. We know no more about him than is told us there. among the martyrs of that time.
He speaks, moreover, of a tradition that the Saviour commanded his apostles not to depart from Jerusalem for twelve years.16481648 Clement (Strom. VI. 5) records the same tradition, quoting it from the Preaching of Peter, upon which work, see Bk. III. chap. 3, note 8, above. He uses testimonies also from the Revelation of John,16491649 Compare Eusebius' promise in Bk. III. chap. 24, §18, and see note 21 on that chapter. and 237he relates that a dead man had, through the Divine power, been raised by John himself in Ephesus.16501650 No one else, so far as I am aware, records this tradition, but it is of a piece with many others in regard to John which were afloat in the early Church. He also adds other things by which he fully and abundantly exposes the error of the heresy of which we have been speaking. These are the matters recorded by Apollonius.
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WASHINGTON (Reuters) - The White House said on Thursday it does not believe the Constitution gives the president an escape hatch to avoid a United States debt default if Congress fails to increase the borrowing limit before it is exhausted in about two weeks.
"This administration does not believe that the 14th Amendment gives the power to the president to ignore the debt ceiling," White House spokesman Jay Carney said at a briefing.
"Moreover, even if the president could ignore the debt ceiling, the fact that there is significant controversy around the president's authority to act unilaterally means that it would not be a credible alternative to Congress raising the debt ceiling," he added.


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Francesco Natali created these wonderful baroque quadratura and wall frescos in a little church in Pontremoli, Italy. I'd hoped to write a lengthier post about this church, its fabulous history, and the charming work of this lesser known Italian artist, but I think you'd rather just see the photos. So here they are.
I uploaded a ton more photos of the Church on my Flickr page, here.
Remove the stone lintel in the small niche (above) and it reveals a deep crawl space used to secrete dissidents and refugees during World War II. |


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- Handwash - because this Rain Coat is going to take you places
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• Log in to your library account.
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LINK+ is a consortium of more than 50 public and academic libraries in California and Nevada that enables you to search its catalog and borrow member libraries' books.
• Search for a book in the Menlo Park Library catalog at http://menlopark.bibliocommons.com
• If your search results show that the book is unavailable at any of the Peninsula Library System libraries, click on "Try your search in LINK+" on your search results page.
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Ruffled around the edges. Serena is 1-1 heading into Wimbledon, 2011. She got bright colors (and losing?) out of her system before descending upon London. | More Serena: The younger Williams has promised fans some karaoke sessions while at her first Major in a year. Yep, she's got a portable karaoke machine. And yes, she's trying to corral Andy Murray into doing it with her.
Tennis, meet fashion. | Obviously we (and you!) know that tennis fashion is a year-round sort of gig, but the biggest events are Wimbledon and the US Open — at least from a fashion POV. So for tomorrow night's players' party at Richard Branson's digs, the Telegraph in London is laying out which ladies are wearing which designers. Caroline Wozniacki is unsurprisingly rocking Stella McCartney while Serena will be sporting some Burberry. Vivienne Westwood? That honor goes to one Jelena Jankovic. Work it, ladies!
Bring it, Yao! | Li Na is certainly set up for life. Imagine if this chick wins another Slam?! China might demand that it be able to host its own Major. Experts are saying that with her win at the French, Li will surpass Yao Ming, the NBA star, in marketing prowess. We're a little blown over by that claim, but the Nike-sponsored hard-hitter already has several offers up and running with IMG, her reps. Li, who currently has contracts with Nike, Rolex and — get this! — Haagen-Dazs ice cream could start to clean up. An industry expert in China puts it this way: "She will bring you the 'light bulb moment' as an international professional athlete. She is good at her sports, and her personality combines western civilization and oriental wisdom. She is frank, sincere with a steady and relaxed style," explained Qiang Wei, a sports marketing director.
Clijsters withdraws from Wimbledon | No, seriously. She's out. And WTT? They've already gone looking for a summer replacement.
Heather Watson is 2011's Laura Robson … just sayin'.
Wimbledon greats. Ten of them, to be exact. The best ten matches from SW 19's history. They're stacked up — oddly? — by BestCollegesOnline.net. This is a great selection! And the video clips are surreal to watch one after the other.
More surreality: Andy Murray hits two (two!) tweeners in win over JWS
Tennis in Times Square. If you wanted more visuals from our post about the US Open tickets sales event in Times Square, TSF contributor and Tennis.com intern Benjamin Snyder put together a pretty snappy gallery. And how about his one-on-one with Judah Friedlander in the captions? We dig.
Pimms with lemonade? On the Tennis Channel website, columnist James LaRosa has conjured up the most hilarious (and ridiculous) Wimbledon drinking game we've even encountered. And we love it.
Short(er) balls: Because we know Erwin (and Troy!) care, just a note to say that Mary Kate and Ashley turned 25 on Monday. OMG! | Jon Wertheim? He picks Serena to win Wimbledon. | Sure, Roger Federer is a cute dad, but we don't think he falls into the "hot" realms of David Beckham. | ATP Executive Chairman Adam Helfant will step down at the end of 2011. | The new home of British heiress Petra Ecclestone? Don't worry, it has a tennis court. (And cost over $100 million.) | We'll be at the HSBC exo on Monday with Monica Seles and Jim Courier. We'll bring the sunscreen (for Jim!) and you guys bring the Grunt-o-Meter.
(Serena image via Getty; Watson vid via WTA)


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Back here I was asking for a coalgebraic characterisation of the hyperfinite $II_1$ factor. Recall the latter's construction by forming the inductive limit of a chain of matrix algebras $R \to M_2(R) \to M_{2^2}(R) \to ...$, where a matrix is sent to two copies of itself placed in the diagonal blocks, zero elsewhere. Then completion in the weak topology gives the hyperfinite factor.
The trace is halved each step along the chain. Traces for projections in the inductive limit are dyadic rationals in [0, 1], while in the hyperfinite factor they are the whole real interval [0, 1]. Now, the dyadic rationals are the initial algebra for the endofunctor on Bipointed Set, $X \mapsto X \vee X$, identifying the second point of the first copy with the first point of the second copy. The [0, 1] interval is the terminal coalgebra for the same functor and the Dedekind and Cauchy completion of the initial algebra. Perhaps results such as Adamek's Final Coalgebras are Ideal Completions of Initial Algebras may be extended here.
This put me on the quest of characterising the hyperfinite factor coalgebraically. So now the question: what relevant facts are known about the endofunctor on algebras over the reals: $X \to M_2(X)$? I believe the hyperfinite factor is a fixed point. Presumably there is a need to be clear over isomorphism versus Morita equivalence. Might it be that the hyperfinite factor is the greatest fixed point up to isomorphism? Maybe I should be looking in the category of a certain kind of algebra.


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Bioloid GP
Sugiura-san introduced `Bioloid GP`, a new robot kit of ROBOTIS at Make: TOKYO Meeting 06 on Nov 20-21st, 2010. The new robot will be put on the market near future in Japan. Bioloid GP has 18 axes with AX-18 servo which torque is 18 kg・cm.
Pictures of the new robot kit in the case and assembling robot kit were described in Sugiura-san's blog. Lem-san also described and uploaded the new robot video at Make: TOKYO Meeting 06 in his blog.
V-Sido, a new excellent robot control software was demonstrated in Futaba booth. The details of the software are also described in the video【ニコニコ動画】【V-Sido】赤い彗星のMSを市販機ベースでつくってみた. The software has been providing to robot users.
Robot Related Exhibitions at Make: Tokyo Meeting 06
Some exhibition robot related videos were as follows;
Last count 8857


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ZURICH — Scientists have yet to fully unravel the mysteries of rainbows, but a group of researchers from Disney Research, Zürich, UC San Diego, Universidad de Zaragoza, and Horley, UK, have used simulations of these natural wonders to unlock the secret to a rare optical phenomenon known as the twinned rainbow.
Unlike the more common double-rainbow, which consists of two separate and concentric rainbow arcs, the elusive twinned rainbow appears as two rainbows arcs that split from a single base rainbow. Sometimes it is even observed in combination with a double rainbow.
It is well-known that rainbows are caused by the interaction of sunlight with small water drops in the atmosphere; however, even though the study of rainbows can be traced back more than 2,000 years to the days of Aristotle, their complete and often complex behavior has not been fully understood until now.
"Everyone has seen rainbows, even double-rainbows, and they continue to fascinate the scientific community," said Dr. Wojciech Jarosz, co-author of the paper and Research Scientist at Disney Research, Zürich. "Sometimes, when the conditions are just right, we can observe extremely exotic rainbows, such as a twinned rainbow. Until now, no one has really known why such rainbows occur."
Jarosz and the international team of researchers studied virtual rainbows in simulation, considering the physical shape of water drops, and their complex interactions with both the particle and wave-nature of light. The key to the twinned rainbow mystery, Jarosz said, is the combination of different sizes of water drops falling from the sky.
"Previous simulations have assumed that raindrops are spherical. While this can easily explain the rainbow and even the double rainbow, it cannot explain the twinned rainbow," he said. Real raindrops flatten as they fall, due to air resistance, and this flattening is more prominent in larger water drops. Such large drops end up resembling the shape of hamburgers, and are therefore called "burgeroids".
"Sometimes two rain showers combine," Jarosz said. "When the two are composed of different sized raindrops, each set of raindrops produces slightly deformed rainbows, which combine to form the elusive twinned rainbow." The team developed software able to reproduce these conditions in simulation and the results matched, for the first time, twinned rainbows seen in photographs. The team also simulated a vast array of other rainbows matching photographs.
The team's discovery was unintentional. "Initially the goal was to better depict rainbows for animated movies and video games and we thought rainbows were pretty well understood," said Jarosz. "Along the way we discovered that science and current simulation methods simply could not explain some types of rainbows. This mystery really fueled our investigations." The researchers now see potentially wider application of their method beyond computer graphics, speculating that, some day, accurate rendering models of atmospheric phenomena, like the one they developed, could have impact in areas such as meteorology for deducing the size of water drops from videos or photographs.
The research findings by will be presented Aug. 8 in the "Physics and Mathematics for Light" session at SIGGRAPH 2012, the International Conference on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques at the Los Angeles Convention Center. For a copy of the research paper, please visit the project web site at http://zurich.disneyresearch.com/~wjarosz/publications/sadeghi11physically.html.
About Disney Research
Disney Research is a network of research laboratories supporting The Walt Disney Company. Its purpose is to pursue scientific and technological innovation to advance the company's broad media and entertainment efforts. Disney Research is managed by an internal Disney Research Council co-chaired by Disney-Pixar's Ed Catmull and Walt Disney Imagineering's Bruce Vaughn, and including the directors of the individual labs. It has facilities in Los Angeles, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Boston and Zurich. Research topics include computer graphics, video processing, computer vision, robotics, radio and antennas, wireless communications, human-computer interaction, displays, data mining, machine learning and behavioral sciences.


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My son has fallen in love with the Lego City series. Alas, I let him watch a YouTube from the video game, and as we look to reward good behavior with reasonable sets, we are seeing very odd price patterns.
Within the Lego City series, a simple set, like a small car or helicopter might be $10. But the police station might be 70-80 dollars. Ok, more complex set, I suppose I can accept that.
But then we look at some of the medium size sets and the prices on Amazon seem very high. (Any prices I quote for specific things are meaningless since they seem to change).
But we are seeing 200 and 300 dollar sets? That seems a bit extreme.


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Great roundup - I especially like the article on Organic Food :)
Welcome to Wise Bread's Best Money Tips Roundup! Today we found some great articles with tips on cheap car security, affordable organic food, and reusable household items.
15 Inexpensive Car Security Tips — A locking gas cap will make it harder for car thieves to fill the tank. [Saving Advice]
5 Ways to Afford Organic Food — Buy from bulk bins. Prices are usually lower because there is hardly any packaging involved. [Lazy Man and Money]
Eight Things You Can Reuse Instead of Throwing Away — Out of steel wool? A balled up piece of used foil wrap works as a scrubber, too. [Financial Highway]
7 Budget-Friendly Household Cleaners Made From Everyday Items — Place a tea bag in your shoes to absorb the smell. [SavvySugar]
How to Stop Comparing Yourself to Others — Take a look at your own situation. Do you feel that something is missing? If so, make a plan to help you get what you want. [Everything Finance]
Is Your Social Media Profile Making You Vulnerable to Identity Theft? — Even if you don't list your birth date, identity thieves can guess your birth year if you make your graduation info public. [Canadian Finance Blog]
How To Manage Money As A College Student — Do you have a prepaid meal plan? Use it! [Christian PF]
Should You Cash Out of Your Retirement Savings Plan? — Before you cash out your retirement savings, consider the opportunity cost, any taxes and penalties, and the longer work life to make up for lost savings. [The Digerati Life]
5 Tips for School Night Dinners That Make the Grade — Healthy, quick meals are always within reach! Just grab some fresh veggies and protein, and wrap it all up with whole grain tortillas. [Parenting Squad]
Alternatives to College if it Doesn't Make Financial Sense — By going to a trade school, you'll get the training you need to launch a career — without the cost of college tuition. [PT Money]
Wise Bread's Tweetchat (#WBChat) — Don't miss our weekly #WBChat at 12 p.m. PST! We will be giving away prizes!
Be sure to check out our News & Events Calendar to see all the awesome upcoming events in the personal finance world!
Disclaimer: The links and mentions on this site may be affiliate links. But they do not affect the actual opinions and recommendations of the authors.
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Rush: Clockwork Angels full album reviewed track by track
Rush: Clockwork Angels full album review track-by-track
Somebody has got to sit Rush down and read them the rules – you know, the ones that state that they have to act their freaking ages and stop jamming around so damn much; that six and seven-minute songs with lots of badass musicianship are out; that there can't possibly be new sounds to discover; that concept albums are so, like, Hemispheres; that songs are supposed to be verse, chorus, verse – c'mon, call in the pro LA tunesmiths already!
And don't forget to tell them to get at least five or six backing musicians on stage – that's what all the really big bands do; that they need to write some tunes about chicks, for chrissake; that the drummer must play to the song – knock it off with all that, you know, "extra stuff."
And most of all, won't somebody please tell these guys that groups that have been together for 38 years are supposed to suck? They're not meant to have breakthroughs and keep getting better and better. Can't anybody send them the memo?
But wait… hold on a second. If Rush decided to buckle down and behave, if they adhered to the standards and practices of Music 101, that would make them sound like practically every other band out there. They would become safe, predictable and oh so un-Rush-like.
Fortunately, the three men (bassist-vocalist Geddy Lee, guitarist Alex Lifeson and drummer Neil Peart) who power their way through the sprawling, open-hearted and wildly alive Clockwork Angels know that the best way to avoid creative stasis is to simply be themselves, and in doing so they're growing in sophistication and revealing new depths of feeling at an astonishing rate.
Produced by the band and Nick Raskulinecz (the same team that yielded 2007's Snakes & Arrows), the album is built around a narrative of a young man's journey towards his dreams, and fittingly, the music comes at you in a nonrepetitive succession of images, textures and moods, many of them strikingly abrupt – the band never hammers a point for too long; they make a case quickly and move on. It's propulsive and heady – by turns dizzyingly sensual, gut-rocking, lofty and raw – but there's a warm, human spirit to the band's rhythmic volleys, and they have an uncanny gift for imbuing even their most orgiastic musical moments with a unity of feeling and purpose.
What's most amazing about the general state of Rush in 2012 – and this is played out vividly throughout Clockwork Angels – is how comfortable they are in their own skin. "The best actors don't let the wheels show," Henry Fonda once said, and in their own idiosyncratic way, Rush never get bogged down in craft. Their songs, epic in scope, abstract yet achingly personal, rendered here with a commanding sonic radiance, are born out of instinct and impulses, unique as a fingerprint and every bit as fascinating.
A train signal, a dark and descending bassline and some ominous orchestration... Suddenly, blam! - Rush explode into a tough, feisty rocker driven by Alex Lifeson's gritty guitar riff.
As he has done for some time, Geddy Lee sings in the middle register of his voice, and while some might yearn for the days of the banshee wail, the fact is that he has become a far more captivating and intriguing singer with age. When he sings, "In a world where I feel so small, I can't stop thinking big," he's so full of wonder that the words gain a momentum of their own.
The rhythms shift dramatically - it's not just that Peart has superb quirky timing, but that he gets everything imaginable out of his playing. Lifeson veers between gnarly riffing and dreamy top-string textures, and for a while it seems as if he's teasing a solo, biding his time, but when he leans into it he's biting and sassy, tearing off angular phrases before dispatching echo-driven sheets of sound that seem to take flight.
Whereas the single version of BU2B that was released last year kicked down the barn door without warning, now it begins with lightly strummed acoustics. The main riff is just as smashing, however, a growling, grinding earth-mover over which Lee sings, "I was brought up to believe the universe has a plan/ we are only human, it's not ours to understand."
Most bands would stay right there, but Rush keep tossing the ball around - Lee and Peart lock in during the bridge at full gallop, with bass and drums pulsating and bubbling.
A solemn, vaguely religious tone builds - Lee's vocals take on a choir-like cadence - and then Lifeson uncorks a brief zinger of a solo - stabbing, thrusting notes that thrash the listener about before smacking headlong into the final chorus.
A tough, forceful rocker that works its way into the thicket of your senses.
Clockwork Angels
Stephen Colbert once joked with Rush by asking, "Have you ever written a song so epic that by the end of the song you were actually being influenced by yourself in the beginning of the song?" Which could indeed be the case with this mini classic that works as a self-contained rock opera.
It's a lot to take in all at once, but what stays with you are things like Peart's blissful dancing on the hi-hat and Lifeson's bold Townshend-esque revelry. (Can a song have its own overture? It not, it certainly does now.) And then there's Lee's voice, which has never sounded so smooth and unaffected.
When the band is hard charging, Peart pounds on his toms with an almost beastly force. By the 4:30 mark, the spotlight hits Lifeson, performing a solo that plays like an aria.
It all builds to a playful false ending, an audio trompe l'oiel... which proceeds to a shattering finale.
The Anarchist
A sprightly, snaggle-toothed guitar riff leads to a boisterous rocker in which Lee, Lifeson and Peart tumble over one another with calisthenic agility.
It's interesting how few bassists can drive the melodic center of a song without coming off as scenery chewers. Sting is one, and in his own way, Iron Maiden's Steve Harris is another. Geddy Lee fills the room here, particularly in the chorus, and he's supported by Lifeson and Peart, both of whom allow him to reach into himself.
Not that the other guys don't get some, too: Peart punches holes in the mix. His approach is, for the most part, free-wheeling and swinging, but every so often he whacks the snare to such a degree that his hits sound like gunshots. And Lifeson turns in a delirious, elastic solo - during one rather grand phrase he reminds one of Eric Johnson, that sweet, tubey violin tone of his.
The song ends abruptly, and you'll probably do a double take as you hear shards of metal clanging and falling, the journey powering forward.
Sweet and soul, rude and inviting - this phantasmagoric pounder is fascinating in how everything seems effortlessly, inexplicably right. It also features probably the meanest riff that Alex Lifeson has ever played - on record at least - one which dovetails seamlessly into a brutal mass of a verse.
Throughout Carnies, Lifeson keeps upping his game and reaching new heights. His solo is a spiral of patterns both raging and tender. He possesses an extravagant gift for making the perfect sound at the perfect time - bell-like flourishes, scooped-out phased chords, spitfire trills - and his intuition adds to their ceaseless and bewildering beauty.
Halo Effect
Can you possibly tell that a song is destined to become a classic the first time you hear it? Possibly - and if, for some reason, Halo Effect doesn't make it into the pantheon of all-time Rush greats, it'll come damn close.
Over a gorgeous, double-tracked acoustic guitar figure, Geddy Lee sings richly, even-tempered and marvelously expressive. The track surges into a section of stomping power trio goodness, but the overall framework is acoustic, soon laced with elegant strings.
"What did I do before there were words?" Lee asks, bathed in a breathtaking glow of cellos that carry him - and us - away.
Seven Cities Of Gold
Lifeson's guitar breathes fire straight off - his first riff is Hendrixian in spirit - with Lee and Peart catching up for this devilish workout, underpinned by urgent keyboards and Lee's dark-toned vocals.
Seven Cities Of Gold contains nods to Rush's past, but the whole thing feels incredibly alive and vital, with a dazzling assortment of riffs that dodge and weave, rise and fall. The middle section is a sea of psychedelia - it's not outwardly trippy or retro, but it's disorienting, the aural equivalent of the light show in 2001: A Space Odyssey.
A mind-blower, and by the end, all three members are kicking up major dirt.
The Wreckers
A big, brash British power chord opening, evoking so many things Who and Kinks, lights up this one-of-a-kind winner.
There's so much that's good about The Wreckers that it's hard to know where to begin: the way Lifeson flamenco strums his guitar and how Peart catches and accents his every move; how Lee sings huskily and wistfully, revealing previously untapped emotions; and the gleeful way the band bodysurfs giant waves of sound, crashing against one another and stirring up their own kind of current.
This is the kind of song that engages you on so many levels - you like it because it sounds great, because it's being played by Rush and you're thrilled that they can push all the right buttons, but mostly because it renews your faith in the idea that rock music still has crazy and beautiful places to go.
Headlong Flight
Calling any one song a tour de force on an album this bountiful is difficult, but this seven-minute monster oozes with virtuosic zeal and stirring lyricism. Lee kicks it all off with a spacey bass figure, which morphs into a full-throttle, all-hands-on-deck assault that builds in intensity.
"I learned to fight, I learned to love, I learned to feel/ oh! I wish that I could live it all again," Lee sings in the chorus, and it's here that he becomes a bravura vocalist, no longer an acquired taste or an artful stylist, but a true conveyer of poetic heat.
A roller-coaster ride of unison guitar and bass almost runs off the tracks, but Peart is guiding it, battering and rolling. He breaks free for a brief, razzmatazz solo, but the pleasure in the gesture is that it really matters.
By now, one expects big climatic solos from Lifeson, and the kicker is how he taps the mother lode time after time. His wah set piece is all over the place, a huge and gleaming star turn, reckless and daring, as chaotic as surreal comedy and as outrageous as a man chasing a roomful of cats. Bask in the divine madness.
Not an actual song per se, but a haunting segue built on cellos and acoustic guitars, with Lee's minimalist vocal evoking a moonlit gospel meeting.
Wish Them Well
A blissed-out romp that starts with a fake-out: Are those white-hot guitars or a cranked-up Hammond organ over Peart's ramrod drums? Hard to tell, but it's a magical combo.
One of the consistent pleasures of any terrific Rush song - just pick one - is taking in the sheer spectacle of their efficiency, the almost freakish way in which the team always pulls together but everybody gets to be a starter. Here it's Peart, whose feverish and inventive playing creates its own kind of orbit. But even when the other players are spinning into the far reaches of space (Lifeson's solo is particularly cosmic), he never leaves them stranded.
Lifeson's guitar takes on a shimmering quality for the ride-out, an unforced jam that moves with the ease of a victory lap.
The Garden
A pastoral delight that comes over you like a daydream. Graceful and buoyant acoustics, tasteful orchestration, and Lee singing in a simple, unaffected style make up the bedrock of The Garden.
Peart joins in on a second verse, laying down a soft shuffle, and even when he appears to be doing very little, his sense of composition and movement has a profound impact. His patterns are so natural that it's almost as if the sticks breezed into his hands and started playing him.
After a spellbindingly romantic piano interlude, Lifeson reaches in and pulls out a multi-dimensional guitar solo, one which recalls the mysterious epiphanies from Limelight. There's a certain melancholy quality to his phrasing, as is he's pausing briefly to look behind his shoulder.
By the end, he's rejoined his bandmates and the three march off intrepidly together. They don't dwell in the moment - there's no needlessly showy flourishes or building the crescendo up as "epic" - but the further away they get the more it becomes apparent that the spell they've cast and the resonance of Clockwork Angels will linger on.


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Terror and Beauty: Martin Hägglund's "Dying for Time"
By David WintersFebruary 5, 2013
Dying for Time by Martin Hägglund
THE SWEDISH PHILOSOPHER and literary scholar Martin Hägglund has swiftly established himself at the center of some of today's most lively intellectual debates. Since the publication of his pioneering book Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life in 2008, Hägglund has played a pivotal role in the ongoing appraisal of deconstruction's place in the humanities. Even before the death of its founder Jacques Derrida in 2004, deconstruction — broadly, the practice of overturning implicit "oppositions" in texts, or indeed in entire systems of thought — had been absorbed by a diverse array of academic disciplines. During the last decades of his life, Derrida's ideas spread not only to literary and cultural studies, but as far afield as legal theory and even theology. There was even talk of a "religious turn" in deconstruction, and in Derrida's work in particular.
Radical Atheism, a bold and iconoclastic book, argued that "all attempts to assimilate Derrida's thinking to a religious framework" were hopelessly "wrongheaded." Christian thinkers like John D. Caputo had drawn comparisons between Derrida's discourse and the similarly slippery language of apophatic or "negative" theology, in which words can only circle around a God whose name remains ineffable. Hägglund, however, held that such religious readings ignored Derrida's deep commitment to atheism. Far from gesturing at an ungraspable transcendence (the "unknown God" of apophaticism), Hägglund demonstrated that deconstruction was firmly focused on the finitude of human life. Not only that, but religion, in reaching toward such transcendence — in its "desire for immortality" — was itself simply a "dissimulation" of a deeper "desire for survival." That is, religion may strive to surpass the transience of temporal life, but, in so doing, it discloses an inescapable investment in it. In the last analysis, religion is rooted in our primal drive to go on living.
Derrida's fans and critics alike are fond of quoting his famous claim, put forward in his 1967 book Of Grammatology, that "there is nothing outside of the text" ("il n'y a pas de hors-texte"), and for many his name remains related to a somewhat outmoded "linguistic turn" in philosophy, much scorned by metaphysically-inclined thinkers like Alain Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux. In contrast, Radical Atheism redescribed Derrida as a thinker for whom "there can be nothing beyond mortality," and who was less involved with "language for language's sake" than with life as it is lived. The political theorist Ernesto Laclau remarked that Hägglund's argument had approached "the zero degree of deconstruction," a bottom line that could not be "assimilated" to theology or any other supervening discourse. Indeed, in Hägglund's hands deconstruction isn't reductively "discursive" at all. Instead, it's aligned with the most essential level of human experience: that of living and dying, and of the desires to which they give rise.
Hence, Hägglund could be said to have brought deconstruction "back to life." His latest book, Dying for Time, further develops his revitalized version of Derrida's thought. This time around though, Hägglund hones in on an area rather less abstract than theology. Dying for Time is largely a work of literary criticism, concerned with what another deconstructive critic, Jonathan Culler, once called "the concrete and exemplary dramas of literature." Unlike theology or philosophy, literature can be considered "concrete and exemplary" insofar as it enacts and illuminates lived experience, tracking the texture of our everyday desires and dilemmas. And crucially, for Hägglund, deconstructive criticism, too, must keep close to this texture. As he states at the outset of Dying for Time, deconstruction "is not simply an extrinsic theory" that can be "applied" to literary texts; instead, it must be "derived" from those texts, just as they are themselves derived from our experience of "fundamental questions of life and death, time and space, memory and forgetting."
Dying for Time revolves around close readings of canonical novels by Marcel Proust, Virginia Woolf, and Vladimir Nabokov. Broadly speaking, these three novelists could be called "modernist," in at least one sense: each sought to reconfigure literature's representation of time. Modernism, as Baudelaire memorably remarked, tends to express an essential tension between "the transient, the fleeting," on one side, and "the eternal and the immutable" on the other. On the one hand, modernist writers strive to isolate specific instants or sensations: what Woolf called "moments of being," and Joyce "epiphanies." On the other, such moments may seem to evoke an otherworldly eternity. For example, Joyce identifies his epiphanies with earthly reality; they are "the most evanescent of moments," fragile and fleeting, like life itself. Yet he also hints that these epiphanies amount to "a spiritual manifestation" of immortal bliss, as is implicit in the idea's religious root. Hägglund's contention is that literary critics have been misled by this theological impulse into finding a false transcendence within modernism. As he argues, "epiphany still tends to be aligned with a supposed experience of timelessness"; thus, modernism "continues to be read in accordance with a desire for immortality."
To make modernism committedly mortal, despite its apparent desire to be otherwise: this is Hägglund's aim in Dying for Time. His argument hinges on a newly minted concept he calls (recalling Derrida's own fondness for striking coinages) "chronolibido." Put simply, the theory of chronolibido recapitulates Radical Atheism's claim that all desire, especially the religious desire for immortality, is bound up with a basic "investment in survival." Even when we seek to transcend time, we do so because our time-bound lives can be lost. Our finitude is the foundation for all our desires, and all our fears. In fact, desire and fear — philia and phobia — form the flip sides of chronolibido, as Hägglund explains:
My key argument concerns the co-implication of chronophobia and chronophilia. The fear of time and death […] is generated by the investment in a life that can be lost. It is because one is attached to a temporal being (chronophilia) that one fears losing it (chronophobia) […] It is because the beloved can be lost that one seeks to keep it, and it is because the experience can be forgotten that one seeks to remember it.
So when we wish, like Plato did, to step out of time into a state of eternal repose, we don't realize why we wish this. We cannot wish for, or care for, anything without a prior awareness that nothing will last.
Hägglund's approach to Proust provides perhaps the best example of "chronolibidinal" criticism in action. First he surveys almost all of the landmark studies of À la recherche du temps perdu, and finds them wanting. (One of the joys of Hägglund's work is his willingness to venture this sort of sweeping, bravura critique.) From Georges Poulet to Gilles Deleuze, Proust scholarship has, says Hägglund, mistaken the famed "involuntary memories" of Marcel, the book's protagonist, for revelations of a "timeless essence." What's more, when Marcel himself speaks of memory as "extra-temporal," Hägglund counters that such claims "are contradicted by the logic of the text." This is a classic deconstructive move: reading a text against itself, so as to deflate the received ideas of other readers. For Hägglund, then, even when Marcel's memories appear to free him from time and death, their effect is in fact to "recall him to the pathos of mortal life." This pathos reaches its peak when memory shades into mourning, as in a passage where Marcel remembers his dead grandmother:
Lost forever; I could not understand, and I struggled to endure the pain of this contradiction: on the one hand, an existence, a tenderness, surviving in me such as I had known them … on the other hand, as soon as I had relived, as though present, that felicity, to feel it traversed by the certainty, springing up like a repeated physical pain, of a nothingness that had effaced my image of that tenderness, had destroyed that existence.
In Proust's novel, Hägglund writes, memories of life are always also memories of loss. Even the most ecstatic recollection returns us to a world in which the remembered object is no more. Moreover, this is as true of our memories of ourselves as it is of our memories of others. Our lifetimes, too, are traversed by "nothingness," since every moment we live through "must extinguish itself as soon as it comes." Time is always passing away, each successive second negating the one before, such that "the present itself can come into being only by ceasing to be." In this sense, "extinction is at work in survival itself." Thus the epiphanies we find in Proust do not transcend time. Rather, these memories retrieve the ambivalent rhythms of persistence and disappearance that animate actual life. Proust's real revelation is not that memory makes us immortal, but that life is at all times destructible.
In a subsequent chapter, Woolf's "moments of being" meet a similar treatment. Time and again, Woolf's writing tries (in the words of her classic novel To the Lighthouse) "to crystallize and transfix the moment." In that book, the painter Lily Briscoe seeks "to feel simply that's a chair, that's a table, and yet at the same time, it's a miracle, it's an ecstasy." But to fill fleeting sights and sounds with significance is not to imbue them with "timeless presence," as some readers of Woolf have assumed. Woolf's privileged moments, like Proust's memories, can't help but reveal "how even the most immediate presence passes away." Not only this: in Woolf temporality becomes traumatic, brutally attuned to the terror of transience. Clarissa Dalloway lives her life as a chain of charged moments that leave her full of "divine vitality" and at the same time "alone against the appalling night […] suddenly shrivelled and aged." For Hägglund the two go hand in hand, since "the pathos of Woolf's moments of living stems from the fact that they are always already moments of dying" (emphasis Hägglund's). So, Woolf shows us how living in time is at once chronophilic and chronophobic; her characters' encounters with existence are:
not moments of timeless plenitude, but [they] testify to the inherent traumatism of temporal life. They may intensify one's attachment to life […] but they may equally well shatter one's attachment to life and make survival unbearable.
Hägglund's analysis of Nabokov highlights writing itself, an act that could be considered continuous with our lived experience of time. Since it attempts to preserve its content for posterity, writing is clearly a chronolibidinal practice par excellence. But while Nabokov's scholarly commentators have supposed that "his writing is driven by a desire to transcend time," Hägglund has a more nuanced model in mind. For him, all writing is radically corruptible: to put pen to paper is to risk slips, mistakes, misinterpretations.
Nabokov's late novel Ada or Ardor: A Family Chronicle is a case in point. The book recounts the reunion of Van and Ada, two siblings whose incestuous love story is told by means of Van's memoirs. But what Van has written is incomplete, and is incessantly interrupted by notes and revisions — his own, Ada's, and those of an unnamed editor. "Far from redeeming corruptibility," therefore, writing here "highlights that inscription is inseparable from the risk of erasure." Under such conditions, even Van's most treasured memories — like that of when he and Ada first made love — dissipate into doubt and vagueness: "Summer 1960? Crowded hotel somewhere between Ex and Ardez?" When writing records and recalls times like these, the very "process of preservation" prolongs their exposure to "the threat of oblivion." In this way, rather than transcending time, to write only ever deepens our investment in a double-edged struggle of "survival" and "disappearance."
Dying for Time delivers a revolutionary reading of the ways in which modernist writers express elemental aspects of human existence. In the process, it disproves the idea that deconstruction — or, indeed, literary theory per se — is always off-puttingly arid and abstract. Hägglund's approach is absolutely the opposite, attuned at all times to "the impossibility of being indifferent to survival." Whether or not there is nothing outside of the text, Hägglund puts texts back in touch with "the terror and beauty" of being briefly alive; of being able to "suffer, lose things, and die," and thereby knowing "what it means for something to be precious." This is a book that brings literature and theory into forceful collision with life's underlying realities. The resulting insight is resolutely atheistic: neither art nor thought allows access to another world of timeless perfection. Instead, each is irreducibly interwoven with the world in which we live. Some say that literary theory is dead, out of fashion, a thing of the past. But Hägglund shows how it can and should go on living: in unflinching fidelity to how it feels to be human.
LARB Contributor
David Winters is a literary and cultural critic. He has written for the Times Literary Supplement, Bookforum, The Millions, The New Inquiry, Radical Philosophy and others. He blogs at Why Not Burn Books? and is a contributing editor at 3:AM Magazine.
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The easiest way to cut sodium? Try these flavor-packed recipes
broiled sardines with fennel and olives
Serves 8 / Serving tips: This Mediterranean classic makes a marvelous appetizer on crostini or any toasted bread. Or toss with cooked linguini and top with shredded Asiago cheese for a fast entrée — not your ordinary dinner. View recipe.
pineapple chicken salad
Serves 6 / Fresh yet hearty, this sweet and tangy salad makes a nice light lunch or springtime dinner. View recipe.
Black bean, corn, and quinoa salad
Serves 8 / Pack with: whole-grain crackers or breadsticks. Drink: flavored sparkling water. Prep tip: Easy to modify; just add any crisp vegetables you have on hand (zucchini and fresh chilies are good). Serving tip: This is also nice for a light dinner, mounded on a bed of mixed greens. View recipe.
moroccan three-grain salad with flaxseed-walnut dressing
Serves 6-8 / Colorful accents of carrots, zucchini, red onion, and fresh parsley add eye appeal to this delightful combination of whole grains, topped with a tasty omega-3-rich dressing. Test kitchen tip: If you have a toaster oven, it's an easy way to roast nuts. Spread pieces on foil and set toaster to low. View recipe.
maple-pecan quinoa
Serves 1 / Quinoa contains 11 protein grams per half-cup—up to 50 percent more than other grains—and supplies all of the essential amino acids. Its complex carbohydrates also give you an energy boost to start your day. Plus, it's a snap to make—especially if you opt for quinoa flakes, which cook in 90 seconds. View recipe.
carrot breakfast muffins
Serves 12 / Pack with: a small tub of yogurt. Drink: orange juice. Storage tip: These keep well in the freezer. View recipe.
buttermilk panna cotta with macerated berries
Serves 10–12 / This creamy, eggless custard is the creation of Jennifer Dugan, executive pastry chef at the Wine Spectator Greystone Restaurant at Napa's Culinary Institute of America. View recipe.
pear and persimmon galette
Serves 8 / This lovely and surprisingly easy dessert celebrates these fall fruits' prime season. Prep tip: A Japanese mandolin makes for easy slicing, but a sharp knife will work too. When you reach the pears' core, remove with a melon baller. View recipe.
Carrot, lemon, and wheatgrass juice
Serves 2 / You'll love how you feel after downing this vitamin-C-rich drink. Ingredient tip: Look for wheatgrass juice in the freezer section of a natural food store; it's generally sold in 12-packs of 1-ounce shots. View recipe.
Goat Cheese Blackberry Tart
Serves 12 / Developed by James Rouse, ND, the contributor of monthly recipes that appear in our Update section, this healthy dessert was described as "outrageous" and "absolutely to die for" after it appeared in July 2004. The wheat-free, almond meal and date crust is a treat (look for almond meal in the baking section of your grocery store), and each slice is loaded with fiber and antioxidants—so don't feel guilty when you indulge. View recipe.